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Swastikas and cyborgs: Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations as a war book
By Rupert Read
Abstract
I argue that the Philosophical Investigations is a work that in its centre-piece (the anti‘private-language’ considerations, often called “the private language argument”)
responds to the great issue of its time: the World War, and the racism and failure of
inter-human acknowledgement both underlying and horrifically played out in that
war. Seeing a human being as an automaton, or seeing an everyday object as a
swastika: these two possibilities that Wittgenstein at one point in his book discusses in
one and the same sentence index (respectively) that failure and the needful vigilance
of our response to it. Acknowledging the pain of other human beings rather than
wrongly modelling that pain in a way that makes others’ being inaccessible to us is
what at the deepest level is required if we are to avoid falling back into the mindset
that led to World War Two and the Holocaust.
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Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations as a war book
By Rupert Read
It is well-known that the Preface to Ludwig Wittgenstein’s second great masterpiece,
the Philosophical Investigations, includes a powerful allusion to “the darkness of this
time” (PI vi), the time in which the book was written. But it is a fact rarely made
anything of that the book was begun in about 1936 (as the Nuremberg Laws come into
force and Germany remilitarized the Rhineland) and that it and in particular that
Preface was indeed completed at a perhaps-still-darker moment in human history:
(January) 1945.
And there is a remarkable ‘coincidence’ here, an extraordinary and perhaps-telling
symmetry: Wittgenstein’s first masterpiece, the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, was
completed in 1918… It seems to me truly remarkable that so little has been made of
this ‘coincidence’.
Of course, this is in part because Wittgenstein’s writing seems on the surface
apolitical, ahistorical, and even deliberately so. But Marjorie Perloff has done a fine
job of laying out how the Tractatus, Wittgenstein’s first masterpiece, can be seen as a
‘war book’,i a book owing itself in significant part to the dark time in which it was
written, while the young Wittgenstein was a soldier fighting for the Austro-Hungarian
Empire in the First World War.
Perloff does not make the same case for the Investigations. That is my self-appointed
task in this paper. I wish to argue that the Investigations is exactly the kind of work
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one would expect of an intensely abstract and analytical mind that is nevertheless
concerned with the deepest and (in a deep sense) most concrete problems there are: in
fact, with the underlying central ethical and political problem of its time.ii
Wittgenstein’s PI , I claim, is deeply open to what was without doubt the fundamental
issue of its time (i.e. of the time of Hitler et al): acknowledging, really
acknowledging, the humanity of all contemporaneous human beings, and not merely
of a favoured sub-set thereof.iii
In the 1930s, Wittgenstein became increasingly preoccupied with the rise of fascism
and Nazism. It is interesting to note that during this time the vaguely anti-Semitic
nature of a few of his personal jottings during previous years gradually drops away to
nothing. My hypothesis (following David Stern) is that Wittgenstein came to feel his
occasional tendency toward anti-Semitism as he reflected on his own part-Jewish
heritage etc. an unacceptable indulgence, an immaturity, in the time of the 1000 year (
/ 12 year) ‘Reich’.
So, how am I suggesting that this is manifest in the text of the Investigations? For it is
one thing to make an easy hypothesis concerning explicit scattered remarks about
Jewishness in his notebooks; quite another, to claim that the apparently highlycerebral/abstract and non-politically-specific investigations that make up the PI can be
plausibly read as relating directly to a similar topic.
I claim that Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations is (among other things) a
deep reflection upon our human tendency to deny the humanity of other humans.iv
And a therapy for that tendency. It is, in other words, a kind of reflection upon
tendencies such as Nazism, a reasoned and impassioned line of thinking against the
dangerous and immature belief that such an ultimately-‘inhuman’ ideology as Nazism
could only be a product of Germany (see also for example Wittgenstein’s parallel
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remark directed against Malcolm’s naïve and dangerous belief that the ‘British
national character’ would not be capable of uncivilised or underhand behaviour
towards Germany v), and a profound meditation upon what is actually necessary in
order for us to overcome the easy attractions of such widespread human tendencies of
mind. Wittgenstein’s investigations, unlike so many others, persistently aim to go, as
he always insisted it was essential to go,vi to the root of the lived delusion that could
issue in the kind of profound inhumanity that, from the mid-late 30s thru to 1945, as
before in 1914-1918, he was living through.
(It is important to be clear also on what I am not saying. I am not saying that the
Philosophical Investigations is literally about the Second World War, in the kind of
way that (say) books like Anthony Beevor’s are. That would be a bizarrely silly claim.
In saying that the PI can be read with real profit as a ‘war book’, I mean: a book not
only influenced by the war, but deeply concerned with the ways of thinking that
spawned the war and were manifested in the war. This is what I shall aim to show is
manifest in Wittgenstein’s text.)
The Philosophical Investigations involves a teasing progress in which we gradually
come to appreciate that in order to understand what a person is ‘in their essence’ we
have to comprehend the totality of what a person is (not just fragments, as is
traditional in philosophy, such as: their rational mind); similarly, we need to think
through what a language is (not just fragments, as is traditional in philosophy, such as:
declarative sentences, or ‘atoms’ of meaning from which sentences are ‘composed’);
and so on. And we come to understand (among other things, and crucially) how very
deeply a person requires the other people that form a society in order to be a person,
at all. We come to understand this by a process of working through for ourselves
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unsatisfactory formulation after unsatisfactory formulation, each a little more complex
than the one before. These formulations are in many cases more or less robotic or
machine-like vii ‘models’ which inevitably fail adequately to characterise human or
social being – though quite often they successfully characterise something, and they
certainly have their attractions.
Thus ‘for example’ (and in very brief and very roughly) the book can be said to
consist sequentially of a therapeutic examination of what the reader wants out of
concepts such as ‘language’ [sections 1-88] and thus of what the reader is prepared
and not prepared on reflection to call ‘language’, a reflection on the conception of
philosophy implicit in the examination thus far and to follow [89-133], a therapeutic
examination of (what the reader wants out of concepts such as) ‘rules’ [sections 134242] … and then what is often (and in my view rightly) considered the greatest prize
of all: a therapeutic examination of the reader’s (and the author’s) inclination to
fantasise that a ‘private’ language will satisfy his desires, giving him certainty, the
kind of foundation that he philosophised in order to obtain [243-c.428]. I shall
therefore focus here on certain of these, Wittgenstein’s ‘anti-‘private-language’
considerations’. These are the most crucial fruits on the tree; and they are what, if
anything, above all makes this a war book.
________________________________________________________________
At 255, Wittgenstein writes, famously, “The philosopher treats a question: like an
illness.” I believe, following Baker and others, that this oft-repeated object of
comparison for philosophy that Wittgenstein uses here and elsewhere ought to be
taken very seriously (while of course we should all recognise that it is at the end of
the day: (‘only’) an object of comparison (see PI 130-132), or an analogy. However
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deep it goes, it doesn’t as it were go all the way down to capturing fully what
Wittgensteinian philosophy is.viii ).
According to Nazism, the Jews etc were a disease, an illness of the body-politic, a
parasite on the volk. The reality, of course, was the reverse: that it was Nazism and the
like that was the illness. Or at least: this (Nazism and its ilk being like an illness) is an
analogy that we should take very seriously. Wittgenstein treated this illness. With a
philosophical depth-psychology. Going to the root of it. In particular, in the passages
that follow 255.ix
Take for instance 286:
“What sort of issue is: Is it the body that feels pain?—How is it to be decided? What
makes it plausible to say that it is not the body?—Well, something like this: if
someone has a pain in his hand, then the hand does not say so (unless it writes it) and
one does not comfort the hand, but the sufferer: one looks into his face.” [underlining
mine]
One comforts somebody; not a body. This, it seems to me, is a very powerful
‘reminder’ (see PI 127). But I use the scare-quotes advisedly: for it is not exactly a
reminder of anything. Or, if it is, then still it is not really reminding one of anything
intellectual or factual (still less, theoretical) in any ordinary sense at all. Rather, one is
reminded, one might say, of what it is to be a decent human being. The particular
purpose of this ‘reminder’ is to assist one in being mindful of what one has, hopefully,
never forgotten, but probably has: how to feel for others.
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Commonly, we are taught to think of Wittgensteinian reminders as reminding us of
philosophical ‘points’ or ‘truths’. But this seems to me insufficiently to recognise the
radicality of Wittgenstein’s philosophical method. It is more the other way around:
Wittgenstein uses philosophical dialogue to remind us of ourselves… To re-mind (and
re-heart and re-body) us. To help us to re-humanise ourselves.
When I read, “[O]ne does not comfort the hand, but the sufferer: one looks into his
face”, I feel moved. And perhaps a little ashamed, of times when I have failed to do
this. The appeal here is not ungainsayable; it is an appeal which can fail. But that is in
the end part of its very power: one knows that it is possible to do this (to fail to
respond to the suffering of another); one knows that one has done so oneself
(sometimes). Fascism grows out of failures such as these. Fascism begins at home...
One knows that, on a vast scale, such failure is being trumpeted as a necessary
hardness, a noble or at least necessary overcoming of a common human reaction, at
places around the world, as one writes / reads... …Or at least; that is certainly
something Wittgenstein knew, at the time that he wrote this remark. (And one is
reminded perhaps also then of the ways in which it helps, if one wants to hurt others,
not to have to look into their faces. Think of the ease with which gas chambers
worked as a huge-scale extermination method, compared to the great difficulty of
face-to-face mass killing. The real significance of the industrialisation of killing is not
its greater practical ease, but rather its greater psychological and inter-personal ease.)
We can I think then say this: That what it is to see mind and body clearly is
intrinsically – ‘internally’ – related to ethical and existential questions. To the
question of our relatedness with one another, to what we owe one another.
Philosophers have often interpreted Wittgenstein’s anti-‘private-language’
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considerations as if they were simply a novel intervention in ‘the mind-body
problem’, considered as a technical or metaphysical question. But they are not:
because they reconceive that ‘problem’ as a (real) human, ethical problem. A problem
that has of course very real and concrete political/historical embodiments. (The failure
to see the ethics present in the relating of minds and souls to bodies as that is shown
us by the likes of Wittgenstein is a failure precisely found in Nazism and its like.)
Most philosophy has tended to think that metaphysics and/or epistemology are First
Philosophy, fundamental philosophy. Wittgenstein puts this into question. He submits
in these discussions that you can’t do First Philosophy without doing ethics. Ethics is
inextricably an aspect of First Philosophy. One might call this a proto-Levinasian
moment in Wittgenstein. “[O]ne looks into his face”…x
Or take the following powerful, representative passages:
[289] “When I say ‘I am in pain’ I am at any rate justified before myself.”—What
does that mean? Does it mean: “If someone else could know what I am calling ‘pain’,
he would admit that I was using the word correctly”? // To use a word without
justification does not mean to use it without right.
[374] The great difficulty here is not to represent the matter as if there were
something one couldn’t do. As if there really were an object, from which I derive its
description, but I were unable to shew it to anyone.
We fantasise that, if only we were able to do this ‘impossible’ [non-]thing, then we’d
be home and dry: if we could only show others the ‘object’ that ‘is’ our pain, then it
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would be impossible any longer for them to withhold sympathy from us. If we could
only ‘show’ others our souls, and vice versa, then racism and war would be
inconceivable.xi We are concerned that we lack what we think of as the standard kind
of justification for being entitled to have others hear / feel / acknowledge the truth of
what we say (the truth, in this case, that we, just like them, feel pain). We have not
seen, not felt, that we do indeed have the right to demand acknowledgement, simply if
we are in pain – but that such acknowledgement is all the greater for its fragility, for
its being deniable, for its not being automatic (as it might be, were it (say) to be
programmed into an automaton that they should be ‘sympathetic’ to us.xii (Much as
we are unimpressed by automated apologies for lateness, at a train station…) We do
not deny that pain exists when we refuse, with Wittgenstein, to give in to the deep
attraction to think of pain as an ‘inner object’ (see PI 293); no, rather, we at least start
to allow that pain is real and to get clear on what it is, and how easy to deny its reality
can be, for one unwilling to acknowledge the full reality of another being and of their
suffering.).
What is needed, rather, if we can give up the desire for the fantasy that in fact keeps
us apart from one another (because it seems to prove that we ARE apart from one
another in an unbridgeable way), is to acknowledge – which means, in the end, to
practice -- the ineradicability of our community.xiii To set aside the so-called ‘inner
object’ is to allow space for a realer, realistically-apprehended and -expressed inner
life – and it is that life that is alive in our interpersonal pain-talk. There is a certain
sense in which language itself binds us together, closer than close. (Cf. 384: “You
learned the concept ‘pain’ when you learned language”. (See also 313.) Our practice
with the word “pain” already expresses our concern for others’ suffering.) Language
does not ensure that we always realise this; far far from it. The realisation of this utter
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closeness is a project, an achievement, albeit an achievement that we mostly carry out
reasonably effortlessly, when bad philosophy / ideology / propaganda / weakness of
the will do not get in the way (as one or more of these usually do). Language, we
might say, gives us the possibility of acknowledgement, of true community; it is up to
us to realise that possibility. Language gets us to the starting line: we have to run the
race for ourselves. Language gives us the tools: we have to do the job…
But we do not need the absurd acquaintance with others’ fantasised ‘private objects’
that the linguistic stereotype of ‘object and designation [name]’ seems to force upon
us as an ideal (Cf. the close of PI 293). No; whenever we are clear about our
language, our ‘grammar’, ourselves, each other, then nothing need stand in the way of
effortless mutual acknowledgement. As Mulhall puts it, following Cavell, following
Wittgenstein: “To identify another as in pain is not simply or merely or just to make a
claim about that portion of the world; it is to identify something about that other as
making a claim on me (which I may or may not acknowledge).” xiv
Compare PI 303:
“ “I can only believe that someone else is in pain, but I know it if I am.”—Yes: one
can make the decision to say “I believe he is in pain” instead of “He is in pain.” But
that is all.--- What looks like an explanation here, or like a statement about a mental
process, is in truth an exchange of one expression for another which, while we are
doing philosophy, seems the more appropriate one. // Just try—in a real case—to
doubt someone else’s fear or pain.”
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That last is a genuine instruction or admonition. And it is again a measuredlyemotional reminder, that carries with it, it seems to me, a charge, a pathos, a realitycheck. Denial of others’ pain is only easy when they are far away, spatially or
temporally. It can still be possible when they are close by, if they are an enemy soldier
, or a demonised ‘race’. (Though even this may be doubted – Don’t soldiers take
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utterly for granted that they are causing one another pain; isn’t that an essential part of
the calculus of pain that determines who wins an individual fight or a larger battle?
Don’t torturers know through and through to their bones that they are causing pain to
those they torture; isn’t that exactly why and how they hope to have power over
them?)
Compare the following case, important to us now, when we are as a civilisation and as
a species in denial about the long holocaust-in-waiting that we are complicit in
creating for our descendants: “One can only believe that future people will suffer,
whereas one knows that present people are suffering.” Or: “One can only believe in
the existence of man-made climate change, whereas one knows that poverty is here
and now.” These are deeply-attractive (and deeply-problematic) ideas.
Now compare this helpful passage, which may loose their hold, from p.223 of section
xi of Part II of PI, which first ties together our tendency to think that there is a tight
parallelism between the alleged profound ‘distance’ from us of others’ pains, and of
the future – and then ups the stakes, by suggesting a (deflationary, therapeutic)
highly-concrete way out:
“ “What is internal is hidden from us.”—The future is hidden from us. But does the
astronomer think like this when he calculates an eclipse of the sun?
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If I see someone writhing in pain with evident cause I do not think: all the same,
his feelings are hidden from me.
… “I cannot know what is going on in him” is above all a picture. It is the convincing
expression of a conviction. It does not give the reasons for the conviction. They are
not readily accessible.
If a lion could talk, we could not understand him.”
Wittgenstein offers – essays – liberation from such pictures as “I cannot know what is
going on in him” (and likewise from such pictures as “The future is hidden from us”).
But when the reasons for a conviction go deep enough, such liberation will be hard
indeed. The task of a great movement, or of a genuine civilisation.xvi After all, Jews
xvii
– and indeed Nazis – can of course talk. But yet history suggests we can still
potentially convince ourselves – given enough effort -- that we cannot understand
them. That they are somehow (even: ineradicably): not really/fully human.
Wittgenstein goes on (p.224; cf. also the argument of his final ‘book’, On Certainty):
“I can be as certain of someone else’s sensations as of any fact…. // “But if you are
certain, isn’t it that you are shutting your eyes in face of doubt?” They are shut.”
Passages such as these profoundly undermine the misreading of Wittgenstein as some
kind of behaviourist. Consider in this connection section 304:
“ “[Y]ou will surely admit that there is a difference between pain-behaviour
accompanied by pain and pain-behaviour without any pain?” –Admit it? What greater
difference could there be?”
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What greater difference could there be… The possibility of simulation only brings out
all the more clearly the utter need to acknowledge and care for the genuine article.
What greater difference could there be, between a case in which someone is in pain,
and a case in which they are not. True aliveness to this difference: this is the ultimate
prize. Once more, we must, I submit, hear an emotional pull, a deep call for
acknowledgement - and some pain - in these words. The difference is so great that it
hurts to be accused of neglecting it – and to recall that one has probably at times
treated pain-behaviour as not expressive of genuine pain, even when it was.
The fantasy of the ‘inner object’, necessarily hidden from others, blunts the possibility
– the necessity – the beauty -- of genuine empathy, of being alive to the human
field,xviii as we might put it, borrowing a metaphor from modern physics. Being alive
to the aliveness and the joy and the suffering of others. (Even: feeling their pain.)
And this in turn suggests a reading of Wittgenstein on the crucial question of the
‘relationship’ xix of the so-called ‘individual’ to the community, to society (See e.g.
sections 240-2, which launch the anti-‘private-language’ considerations). What is an
‘individual’? It is that that cannot be sub-divided. The fundamental unit. In that sense,
the line of thought that I have been pursuing thus far suggests that, for Wittgenstein,
the true ‘individual’ is the community. It is the community that is in-dividual.
But: everything depends on how community is conceived. For Wittgenstein, clearly,
given the discussion above, there is a sense in which humanity (and in fact, the entire
‘field’ of sensory being) itself is to be regarded as a community. The community is
whatever we mutually commune with, whatever we feel in and are in common with.
This is open-ended (open to those that initially seem other), and initially expansive
(the onus is on those who wish to exclude some from this community, not vice versa).
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As I shall discuss below, the desperate efforts of racists etc to reduce that field (and
the insufficient efforts often of all of us to ‘look into one another’s faces’) are selfdeceptive; and yet they have a partial success. Whenever we wilfully exclude others
or fail to acknowledge another’s pain, our mutual community dies a little. When we
do truly acknowledge the other, then we become in-divisible (in-dividual), and strong.
By contrast, the Nazi concept of community, the concept more or less present in most
fascist and racist worldviews (and, unfortunately, at certain moments in Heidegger),
is, I claim, just a sort of 'enlarged' solipsism. It is in that sense precisely vulnerable to
Wittgenstein’s critique. In solipsism, I start from myself, and perhaps try to expand
‘outwards’ to include others who I conceive to be relevantly like me; but the
fundamental gulf (that I have created) between myself and others is such that it is
fiendishly difficult / impossible, if one truly starts with oneself, to make any progress
‘outward’ at all; and this is what Wittgenstein shows. In what (inspired in part by the
term already in use in the Indian sub-continent to describe pretty much this
phenomenon as an ugly mode of ‘ethnic’ thinking and conflict, and in part by Lifton:
see p.434 of his The Nazi doctors) we might dub ‘communalism’, we start from
ourselves, and perhaps try to expand ‘outwards’ to include others who we concede to
be relevantly like ourselves (think of the Nazis’ being keen on the Nordic (not just the
Germanic) peoples as near-brothers in blood; think perhaps too of the Axis in World
War Two); but the fundamental gulf between ourselves and others is deliberate, and
deliberately unovercomable (It is as if this communalism were self-consciously
taking on the great defect of methodological solipsism, and seeking to turn it into a
‘virtue’ of the ‘race’). Communalism is based upon the idea of a gulf between
‘ourselves’ and others, in such a case. The racist does not want the possibility of the
gulf being overcome; he feels indeed in danger of invasion (a telling word, in the
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context of a war book) or infection the other way.xx My claim is that there is a straight
analogy between solipsism and communalism; the attractions (and defects) of one are
the attractions (and defects) of the other. This is in part what enables us to connect
Wittgenstein’s considerations against the very idea of a ‘private language’ directly to
the historical situation that he wrote in.
Thus any appearance of an analogy between Wittgenstein on the one hand and
Nazism (and Heidegger too?) on the other, vis-à-vis the ineradicability of community,
is delusive. For the racist community is ‘communalist’: it is philosophically akin to
the very object of Wittgenstein’s critique (the utter untenability of (and the deep
attractions of) solipsism). The Nazi-style community defines itself over and against
another, and at most works out towards it (and, more strikingly and usually, against
it). The Wittgenstein-style community is not defined over and against anything, not
even non-human animals. It is a truly open field, not a barbed-wire ringed fence.
The Nazi says: us, and perhaps people alike to us, versus people who we set ourselves
against… ‘people’ who merely appear to be alike to us, but who aren’t really people
at all. The solipsist says: me, and perhaps people alike to me, versus the mere
appearances of people alike to me, who aren’t really people at all. Wittgenstein argues
that these parallel modes of relating to others fail decisively: one will be left regarding
others then as not really human at all. As no more than (say) automata that merely ape
humanity.xxi But the failure is doubled, or subtle; for the revisionist conception of the
solipsist or the communalist (the racist) cannot be sustained.xxii It keeps receding in
the face of (actual contact with) the other, and in the face of common-sense, and it
keeps threatening, as we have seen, to become a mere change in notation, mere
wordplay. To secure oneself against these threats, one is enormously assisted (and I
go into this further below, in relation to the case of the Nazis) by deliberate numbing
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against others, by a recession away from rationality and/or emotion, by mind-altering
substances or propaganda, or by some combination thereof.
The Wittgensteinian alternative to the would-be revisionism is: simply us. The
community/society/field; ultimately, the community if you will of all sentient beings.
A community just waiting to be fully achieved, by our actions, by our willingness to
acknowledge.
_____________________________________________________________________
I am not going to essay a complete reading of all Wittgenstein’s discussions of pain
etc in the anti-‘private-language’-considerations. I do not need to: I don’t need to
rehearse all that the fine works of Cavell, Mulhall, Eldridge, Conant, Baker etc have
already suggested or established, on this score. We already have extant in outline a
strong ‘resolute’ reading, which is also necessarily at one and the same time an
‘ethical’ or ‘existential’ reading,xxiii of Wittgenstein on ‘private language’. So, in the
remainder of this paper, I wish simply to focus on a connected series of issues that
this kind of reading (that they have given and that I am giving) raises, and on how I
think that these establish the case that I am making in this paper as a strong one: how
this series of issues signals the aspect (of Wittgenstein’s second masterpiece) that I
am endeavouring in the present paper to make available, and indeed makes it
pressing.
___________________________________________________________________
First: what was it about Wittgenstein that put him in such a strong position to engage
in this kind of thinking? Why was he so strongly attuned to the simultaneous
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centrality and fragility of acknowledgement, of fellow-feeling? Was it an internal
argumentative logic that assured the presence in his work of the crucial moments and
orientation discussed here in this paper – or was it something else? Why, in sum, was
Wittgenstein (in my view) so closely attuned, some appearances notwithstanding, to
the war and its underpinning attitudes, in his philosophising?
I believe that Wittgenstein was particularly ready, ripe for placing centrally in his
philosophy our oneness with one another, our intrinsic empathy, and the ever-present
danger of its loss, not just because of the time in which he lived, nor just because of
the pre-existing internal logic of his philosophising, but also because of his preexisting psychical temperament. The particular nature of his emotionality and mind,
which we can see expressed in intriguing ways in his work (as well as in his life), very
obviously I think in quasi-first-person remarks such as some of those that we have
focussed on above (holding the hand; looking into the face; feeling pain at being
misunderstood as denying people’s pain; etc.).
I am referring to what (exaggerating somewhat) Louis Sass has called his ‘schizoid’
tendencies combined with his (always) hyper-self-aware and hyper-self-critical
intuitions about these tendencies, which made him (according to Sass’s intriguing
account) also the greatest of anti-schizoids.xxiv So I think there was something in him,
independently of the war and of Nazism etc., that made him particularly sensitive to
these issues of acknowledgment and failure to acknowledge others (and failure to be
acknowledged). Because: to be somewhat schizoid is, Sass argues, not just to have a
tendency to see others from a distance; it is also a strong tendency to be able to get
outside of oneself; and sometimes this takes one especially powerfully into the
standpoint of others.xxv (One of the many weird and brilliant things about
Wittgenstein was his own ability to distance himself from…his own tendency to
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distance.) All this is explored and played out in Philosophical Investigations with
great piquancy and intensity in relation to the horrors of wartime racism and
depersonalization-of-the-other; but I think that it is fair to say that, without the war,
much of it might well have played itself out anyway; there might well have still been
much of the same anti-‘private-language’ considerations still.
I might put it this way: Wittgenstein’s extraordinary sensitivity and the reactive
coldness with which I think he managed to live with that sensitivity put him in an
extraordinarily strong position to enter into the heart of humanity’s conflicted relation
with itself that we find exemplified in the anti-‘private-language’ considerations.
Empathy with the naturalness of empathy - and empathy with the failure of empathy...
As I expand upon below, it is the latter, empathy for the anti-empathic, which is truly
challenging psychically and morally, and into which, in his profound entering into the
appeal of solipsism and the like, his deep endeavour truly to understand and to bring
to self-understanding the prevailing anti-empathic philosophical modes of thought -to understand both the philosophers and the wider attraction of their modes of mind -that Wittgenstein led us.
The extreme racism and war of his time made that task all the more urgent, and
intensified the intensity with which Wittgenstein approached it. The task of venturing
mindfully into that darkness… As we shall see, it seems likely to have helped
facilitate the thinking which would issue in his greatest and most concise nailing of
the close relation between the issue of the inhuman human failure to acknowledge
(the issue of the naturalness and yet non-inevitability of such acknowledgement)
which is central to the consideration of the ‘private language’ fantasy and its
attractions on the one hand - and the issue of Nazism and its ilk on the other.
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Next: Why pain? Why is Wittgenstein’s key exemplar, throughout the anti-‘privatelanguage’ considerations, pain? (It could so easily, for example, have been pleasure,
or contentment, or indeed something else like colour(-perceptionxxvi)). The reason, I
believe, is this: that pain is the felt phenomenon that most inclines one to think that it
is private, that it is unutterable (It easily feels more private, one might say, than
colour, and even than pleasure or happiness). In its severity (sometimes), its
(apparent) indescribability. This is another way of saying: that there can easily be
genuinely felt to be (as one might put it) a peculiar difficulty in genuinely attributing
pain to others, and vice versa. (Pain is the easiest case for someone inclined to the
‘private language’ fantasy to make; and so the hardest (and thereby the most
important – for if he wins this one, then a fortiori he will surely be able to win all the
rest) case for Wittgenstein to make.) But this in turn is really just another way of
saying: that the real reason for picking pain is that human beings’ failure to
acknowledge one another is likely to be ‘felt’ most keenly here. In the case of pain,
the felt (or unconscious) attractions of failure to acknowledge another are strongest.
Pain above all seems private; the body in pain inhabits a world different from the
body not in pain, one might want to say.xxvii And the case is especially important,
whenever there are untold millions suffering in one’s continent and across one’s
world from pain being deliberately inflicted upon them…xxviii
Pain appears with reasonable frequency in the Philosophical Remarks and in the Blue
Book. But it is not until 1936-8, it is not until Wittgenstein actually begins work on
what will become the Investigations, that pain in particular, and indeed the anti‘private-language’ considerations in general, start to become central. (And they only
achieve centrality in the passages written during the Second World War: c. 185-428.)
Look for instance at the Brown Book, or at the Big Typescript / Philosophical
20
Grammar – there, they are peripheral. Put these books side by side with PI, notice the
overlaps and what is missing in one that is present in the other: what I am saying is
then pretty clear. It is in the Investigations that it becomes clear that the undermining
of the so-called ‘private language’ fantasy is perhaps the greatest fruit on the tree, and
in which pain becomes the prime way in which that fruit is approached, understood,
and harvested. It is in the Investigations that the case of others’ suffering and of their
need for acknowledgement is expanded – investigated -- in detail. The ‘coincidence’,
at the least, between this timing and the approach and onset and then deepening and
widening of Hitler’s war, is striking. (The ‘calculus’ of pain and suffering, and the
writing of the most of the passages and sentences that I have homed in on above, and
the concern with acknowledgement, becomes central and elaborated in the most detail,
as the pain spread across the continent, across the world.)
Wittgenstein chose pain, one might then say, because it is a or even the nodal point
for the human tendency to fail fully to acknowledge the humanity of others, and
probably the must important phenomenon requiring such acknowledgement, such
being-with.xxix The Philosophical Investigations, one might therefore say, is a book
whose central concern is: the ease with which we can fail this ultimate test, the kinds
of conditions under which we do so, and the ways in which we can learn to overcome
this failing.
One of those conditions which greatly interested Wittgenstein might be helpfully
summed up under the heading of: over-intellectualism. A tendency to construct others
through an intellectualised picture of them, as opposed to simply living with them /
acknowledging them in their and one’s own everydayness.xxx This of course is one of
the features which makes Wittgenstein’s philosophy so unusual, so refreshing … so
21
contrary to the deformation professionelle normally to be expected of a philosopher:
the tendency to assume that intellectual solutions to problems are the best ones, and
the related tendency to assume indeed that ordinary life is basically intellectual (E.g.
to assume that the way we relate to other minds is pre-eminently to theorise them as
existing, an assumption which arguably has us take as the problem of autistic people
(their lack of an effective theoretical orientation toward other human beings) what is
in fact far closer to being the solution that non-autistic people effortlessly practice to
the ‘problem’ of other minds (our standard non-theoretical orientation toward one
another)). To assume, that is, that the failings of ordinary life are generally failings to
be intellectual enough…
Take for example (one part of) the superb demythologising sequence on
consciousness, that runs from about 412 to 428:
412 The feeling of an unbridgeable gulf between consciousness and brain-process:
how does it come about that this does not come into the considerations of our ordinary
life? This idea of a difference in kind is accompanied by slight giddiness,--which
occurs when we are performing a piece of logical sleight-of-hand. …When does this
feeling occur in the present case? It is when I, for example, turn my attention in a
particular way to my own circumstances, and, astonished, say to myself: THIS is
supposed to be produced by a process in the brain!—as it were clutching my
forehead.--But what can it mean to speak of “turning my attention to my own
consciousness”? This is surely the queerest thing there could be! It was a particular
act of gazing that I called doing this. I stared fixedly in front of me—but not at any
particular point or object. My eyes were wide open, the brows not contracted (as they
mostly are when I am interested in a particular object). No such interest preceded this
22
gazing. My glance was vacant… // Now bear in mind that the proposition which I
uttered as a paradox (THIS is produced by a brain-process!) has nothing paradoxical
about it. I could have said it in the course of an experiment whose purpose was to
show that an effect of light which I see is produced by stimulation of a particular part
of the brain.—But I did not utter the sentence in the surroundings in which it would
have had an everyday and unparadoxical sense. And my attention was not such as
would have accorded with making an experiment. (If it had been, my look would have
been intent, not vacant.)xxxi
An interlocutorial voice tries to resist this line of thought, in the opening sentence of
420:
But can’t I imagine that the people around me are automata, lack consciousness, even
though they behave in the same way as usual?—If I imagine it now—alone in my
room—I see people with fixed looks (as in a trance) going about their business—the
idea is perhaps a little uncanny. But just try to keep hold of this idea in the midst of
your ordinary intercourse with others, in the street, say! Say to yourself, for example,
“The children over there are mere automata; all their liveliness is mere automatism.”
And you will either find these words becoming quite meaningless; or you will
produce in yourself some kind of uncanny feeling, or something of the sort.
Seeing a living human being as an automaton is analogous to seeing one figure as a
limiting case or variant of another; the cross-pieces of a window as a swastika,xxxii for
example. [Underlining added]
23
I hope that you find that concluding sentence, in the present context, very striking.
The reason why it is so can hardly not have struck Wittgenstein himself in the writing
of it. For what were the Nazis failing to do, if not: seeing a class of living human
beings as no more requiring acknowledgement from us as fellows, as brothers and
sisters, than automata do...xxxiii
It is critically important that this case of aspect-seeing is strikingly different from the
more well-known cases that Wittgenstein considers (the Necker cube, the duck-rabbit
etc.) elsewhere. For in this case, in order to see the cross-pieces of a window as a
swastika, it is not just that you have to see in a particular way; you have also to deny
something that you are seeing, too. To avoid simply seeing the surround of the
window as a complete square, you have to avoid seeing some of the windowsurround; you have to shut your eyes to it. Likewise, with the deliberate unseeingness
of the be-swastika’d, to some of the human beings around them, the denial of
something, that enables something else to appear… What, exactly? The human being
becomes merely a human body; a new kind of cyborg has been born, from the
depersonalisation that turns a person into an (as-if) machine…
But part of the beauty of the remark is in its even-handedness, its refusal crudely to
refuse to understand. Seeing a living human being as an automaton is not simply an
error, not simply an upshot of stupidity or cant; nor is it quite a complete and utter
existential impossibility, an idle fantasy. It is something that one can lead oneself
toward doing, e.g. by the ‘phenomenonological’ method described in outline in 412.
The method of bracketing oneself, placing oneself in a position of complete
spectatoriality to the reality of others (See the excellent analysis of the passages in PI
central to this paper, at p.265 of Gaita’s A common humanity: “Wittgenstein
diagnosed the trouble to lie at the beginning, with the assumption of the spectator’s
24
stance.”). One might say: the Nazi placed himself as a spectator to the cries of his
victims. He heard them, but he denied them. He didn’t hear them as containing a call
to respond to, as manifesting a shared humanity. He saw them, we might say, as mere
behaviour. And from mere behaviour, one can never ‘construct’ actual feeling,
interiority, a true other. (The only one who the Nazi allows real empathy for is himself
and those racially linked to him. The Nazis, like most other agents of genocide,
constructed themselves as the ‘real victims’, of ‘Jewish international finance’, ‘Jewish
Bolshevism’, of a ‘stab in the back’ during the First World War, etc. . This incoherent
(how could they keep a straight face as they simultaneously condemned ‘the Jews’
quintessentially as Bolsheviks and as international financiers?) and essentially and
mordantly self-pitying self-deceptive attitude makes real empathy for others nearimpossible. As Arthur Koestler held: it is not just power that corrupts. Worse still is
deliberate victimhood that then attains power, rulers who attain power in an already
pre-corrupted state.)
Seeing a living human being as an automaton is, then, an (un-)ethical possibility just
barely - but constitutively - open to us by virtue of the fragility of the criteria and the
acknowledgement on which we mutually depend. This fragility of the mutual compact
of humankind, outlined earlier in relation specifically to the anti-‘private-language’
considerations, is an absolutely central theme of Wittgenstein’s work, properly
understood.xxxiv Other (though not entirely unrelated) methods are possible: for
instance, practice (The homely phrase “Practice makes perfect” comes
uncomfortably to mind here. It is a fact that ought I think to strike us more than it
generally does as crying out for some kind of deeper explanatory understanding that
most concentration camp guards, SS troopers etc found their bloody task easier, not
harder, as time went by. And that, as Lifton argues,xxxv the long slippery slope from
25
sterilisation through involuntary ‘mercy killing’ and systematic ‘medicalised’ killing
at the concentration camps through finally to the extermination camps made the latter
far more feasible than they would have been without the earlier items on that slope).
No: seeing a living human being as an automaton is in some sense possible; it is a
kind of limiting case of what is for human beings (open as we are interminably to
seeing-as) normal vision. ‘For example’: it is like seeing something entirely harmless
and everyday as… a swastika. Something that any of us could potentially do,
especially given the right (e.g. historical) context. It is wrong, it is foolish selfdeception, to pretend that, given enough ‘context’, we could not also potentially see
something essentially harmless and everyday (e.g. someone from another ‘race’) as
dangerous, as a bacillus in the body politic, as not requiring of us acknowledgement
of the kind we unthinkingly lend our own kind.
We make roughly the same kind of available and avoidable wrong, if and when we
fail to recognise how humanly available – even conceivably (Dare to acknowledge it)
to us, to you - the Nazi-style mode of seeing (or at least modes categorially akin to it)
are. The human includes all that Wittgenstein ranges over in the anti-‘privatelanguage’ considerations, all those…less-than-fully-human modes of thinking and
(not-)feeling that centre on being willing to exclude others, at least notionally, from
measuring up to the full humanity that one normally unthinkingly attributes at the
very least to oneself and one’s kin.
That is: we see the swastika, at the limit of what is humanly possible for us. We may
well see a window as (‘containing’) a swastika, in the unusual circumstances when it
becomes natural to do so. When, ‘for instance’, there are (or rather, were) swastikas
all over the continent... If there are swastikas everywhere, and if people wearing
swastikas are accomplishing this extraordinary self-deceptive feat of seeing human
26
beings as if they were no more valuable or truly human than automata, then IN
RESPONSE one might find oneself seeing the cross pieces of a window pane as a
swastika; that extraordinary achievement will be a little less extraordinary, under such
circumstances.
Of course, we shouldn’t exaggerate the historical relevance of the point here: If one
deliberately and sadistically gets the other to violate what is most sacred to the latter,
and takes pleasure from this pain, then there is a sense in which one is far from
treating one’s victim as an automaton. One rather knows with exquisite cruelty of
their humanity.xxxvi So the phenomenon I am deducing from Wittgenstein’s remark
only applies directly to some racist / anti-semitic thinking and action.
How much? Quite a lot, I think. For most of the behaviour of (e.g.) the be-swastika’d,
in World War Two, was demonic in and through its ordinariness, its ‘banality’, its
lack of extreme sadism and yet its calm, casual - genocidal - callousness. Compare for
instance the entirely technical discussions of the burning of human corpses that took
up such a large part of the ‘cultural life’ of Auschwitz. Lifton (p.178) quotes a senior
Nazi doctor as saying of this: “It was a purely technical matter. “Ethical” plays (sic.)
absolutely no [part] – the word does not exist.” (This was the consistent message of
all his informants on this matter, with the exception only of newly-arrived prisoners.)
Lifton comments (p.179) that the problem was perceived entirely as one of “getting
rid of the waste material of a routinized communal enterprise”.
Similarly, Christopher Browning’s definitive study of some of the German mass
murderers who got their hands bloodiest is entitled, intriguingly for our present
purposes, Ordinary men.xxxvii Some would object to my reading of PI that
Wittgenstein’s concern was only the ordinary, not the extraordinary, the political, etc.
. To this, I would reply that the opposing term to “ordinary” for Wittgenstein was not
27
“extraordinary” but “metaphysical”, or sometimes “nonsensical”. In other words: the
ordinary includes everything; everything except that that we utterly fantasise, that
(nothing) that we (merely) imagine that we imagine. In particular, then, it includes
war. In particular: it includes war when war is the norm, when it is quotidianly
ordinary. When it affects every aspect of your life (think, in Wittgenstein’s case, of
rationing, blackouts, your family under siege and under threat of death, even growing
knowledge of unprecedented atrocities under cover of the war,xxxviii and so on and so
forth). The challenge is: not to let the hard times that you are alive in turn what is
empirically ordinary into a subtle ‘justification’ for committing appalling crimes.
Those that Browning (and Lifton) studied rose in sadly few cases to that challenge.
In this crucial remark of Wittgenstein’s that I have quoted, PI 420, we see
Wittgenstein impress upon us the uncanniness resulting from the effort to see (e.g.) a
group of children as automata. Something extremely striking in Browning’s account is
that before (as well as after) their ‘Aktions’, the men of Reserve Police Battalion 101
would almost invariably get drunk. Is it too much of a stretch to suggest that being
drunk is in turn a way to block out that uncanniness? Surely that is what it is:
inebriation enabled ordinary men to overcome their internal division and even
unreality-feelings consequent upon seeing (and acting) in a way that is profoundly
unnatural. This is for instance what led Robert Jay Lifton xxxix to talk extensively
about “psychic numbing” and “numbed violence”, the state in which most
einsatzgruppen aktions were carried out. A drug-induced (i.e. alcohol-induced) sense
of detachment or unreality/derealization, a recession away from their full ordinary
humanity, prevented the seeing-as-inhuman uncanniness from settling in on them and
too drastically distrurbing them (or indeed sending them mad – which did sometimes
happen; though Rudolf Hoss reports (see p.159 of Lifton) that suicide was more
28
common). You can’t do violence to an automaton; how handy then, to be able to see
one’s victims (roughly) as or as-if automata.xl But how difficult: so how necessary
(for all but a small psychopathic minority) to deaden one’s intuitive sense of
uncanniness at the distortion. In other words: to be able to see one’s victims as
automata, it helps, to see as an automaton sees…
And here it is extremely striking that none other than Josef Mengele, ‘Dr. Auschwitz’,
for some the ultimate incarnation of Nazi evil, was not infrequently described by
survivors in terms like these: “like an automaton”; or “Hitler’s robot”.xli The tendency
to allow other humans to become unpeople, as-if-automata, mere bodies that could be
extinguished and dissected etc. at will, has within itself it seems a tendency to help
turn the perpetrator themselves into something very like what they take themselves to
be dealing with: an automaton…
On which, compare this brilliant passage from Lifton (p.455):
“There is always a technical element to medicine and a necessity for a mechanical
model of the body. The ordinary doctor, in effect, says…to the patient: “Allow me to
look at your body as a machine, in order to do what I can in the service of your overall
health as a human being.” But the Nazi doctor held to an absolutized mechanical
model extending out into the environment. The machine of the body was subsumed to
an encompassing killing machine, and Auschwitz inmates had no standing except as
they could be seen as contributing to that larger machine. The Auschwitz self of the
Nazi doctor was also part of that environmental machine…” (Italics mine)
The Nazi doctor ever-increasingly turned his patients (his victims) into machines,
pawns inside a vast machinery of state and of death. The Nazi doctor, iconically, had
29
to ‘treat’ the victims as if automata, as part of a functioning machine that ultimately
required him, the doctor, to become as if a machine / an automaton himself…
Am I distorting the process? Some would say that what actually happened in many
cases was less to do with seeing-as less-than-human in the sense of somehow robotic,
and more in the sense of simply projecting your self-loathing onto the other, vividly. I
am thinking for instance of Klaus Theweleit’s remarkable work. Well; I think that my
reading, following Wittgenstein, is eminently compatible with what is right in that
approach. You strip away the humanity of the victim, and project your self-loathing,
especially your loathing of your own body and/or of your homosocial or homosexual
desire and/or of the female body, onto them. They become a tacit vehicle for your
self-disgust; their independence of mind or action is bracketed. This is structurally
much the same as them being seen as in themselves automata. It is only your
‘projection’ that ‘animates’ them… And in the process, it greatly helps once more if
you can become machine-like. If you can, as Theweleit puts it in Male fantasies,
“live…without any feelings,” in the grip of “the fascination of the machine”. xlii
There is an important, ordinary sense in which seeing a living human being as an
automaton is not just difficult, but impossible. A sense in which it cannot be done. I
mean my paper and my reading of Wittgenstein here to be entirely alert to that, too.
For what this does is alert us to the crucial sense in which the Nazis did not believe
their own words, their own propaganda. This is the flip-side of the concern presented
earlier in relation to PI 286 etc: Do we truly believe our own words, when we say that
we acknowledge others’ pain? The answer is shown largely in our actions, in how
easily or otherwise we fall tacitly into some version of denial. Did the Nazis or others
30
like them truly believe their own words when they denied humanity to their victims,
when they called them sub-human etc.; or again, the Hutu genocidaires when they
consistently called Tutsis ‘cockroaches’? Part of the answer is shown in their efforts
to deny what they were doing;xliii that is, in their tacit and overt acknowledgements of
the limits of denial (of others’ humanity). Seeing humans as cockroaches or as vermin
of whatever kind is not just difficult; it is a limiting case of something that is
possible… I.e. It is in a certain sense conceptually impossible to attain stably, and yet
remain sane and honest, un-‘doubled’. This is another aspect of what is lastingly
important, I suggest, about Wittgenstein’s formulation, “Seeing a living human being
as an automaton…”
This utterly endlessly peculiar hybrid, a living human being as an automaton, is the
conceptual cyborg of my title… This is the most important of PI’s several ‘cyborgs’,
tenuously present (when human reality and beauty is absent) in the eye of the
beholder…
_______________________________________________________________
In the Second World War, as he wrote his second and greatest work, Wittgenstein
worked as a medical orderly, wrote a brilliant disquisition on ‘wound shock’, and in
sum contributed as best he could in a manner befitting a late-middle-aged man lacking
in the kinds of ‘vocational’ skills that his colleagues Keynes (e.g. in his ‘How to pay
for the war’) and Turing (in his work on breaking the Enigma code) possessed to
helping the allied war effort against fascism. Meanwhile: Wittgenstein wrote his war
book. To say it again: the ‘Philosophical Investigations’ is, I claim, the kind of work
that one would expect to be written by a philosopher wanting to work (at the deepest
31
possible level) through our common latent inclinations to be attracted by the habits of
mind (e.g. racism) that can be gelled into an ideology such as Nazism -- and thus to
provide the intellectual tools to overcome its subtlest attractions. The Investigations
reveal a mature philosophical and human mind at work, a mind wiser than that that
wrote the great Tractatus, the immensely-innovative 1930s manuscripts, etc. . A mind
with heart: one profoundly misses the point of PI, if one hears it as a cold or
distantiated work. One is 180 degrees wrong, if one makes that frequent misreading.
For, on the very contrary, the primary topic of the book, its problematic, is the
coldness to life of most philosophical reflection (and in particular: to the lives of
others), a coldness that the PI is designed to midwife the overcoming of. One must be
willing to hear the aliveness to the suffering of others manifest in passages such as PI
286, 287, 303, 304, and in the end throughout the whole thrust of the book, if one
wants to understand Wittgenstein.
The Philosophical Investigations was a book designed among other things to try to
help try to overcome the suffering of a suffering world.xliv It lets one deep into the
worldview of those (at times: all of us) who are inclined in one of various ways to
deny that suffering. And in particular then to play its part in helping to ensure that the
likelihood of the rise once more of the kind of ideology that sparked the Second
World War is kept as low as possible. One thing necessary for that likelihood being
kept low being precisely: acknowledgement of its deep psychological/intellectual
roots and attractions, its easy appeal, its not simply being a historical accident or a
one-off calamity of evil.xlv Failure to acknowledge or to understand the failure to
acknowledge or to understand is simply to repeat the failure, and to make its yet
further recurrence more likely.
32
To overcome the inclination to an attractive philosophic delusion, one needs to dig it
up over and over again from the roots. This is hard work, and requires one to circle
the delusion again and again, to handle it both genuinely and gently,xlvi to approach it
in its most attractive form(s), to approach the forms of it that can work on all of us
and not just the extreme forms which have gripped those who we like to think we are
absolutely not like… . Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations is a book which
brilliantly diagnoses the habit of the mind, which is also a habit of the heart, the
inclination to believe fully only in one’s own suffering or in the suffering of others
who one judges/allows to be alike/akin to one. It lets one into the heart of that
darkness, including crucially in one’s own heart. If we are to acknowledge fully the
reality of others, to acknowledge with deserved depth their shared personhood, we
must also acknowledge fully why it is that this acknowledgement can be a difficult
matter for us. An ethical/existential challenge, a political challenge, even.
It is arguably at least in relative terms easy to love and sympathise and empathise
with the oppressed. To feel at least pity (See PI 287).xlvii The even tougher task, which
sooner or later must be undertaken, is to understand the oppressors, and to
acknowledge them too (while not abandoning in the least one’s complete clarity that
they, and not their victims, were the ones in the wrong.) For the ultimate attraction is
to think that one has nothing in common with the perpetrators.xlviii But this is not true.
All great Holocaust-writing/literature aims to establish in us this point that we resist
and resist; Wittgenstein’s book is no exception.
The full flourishing of other humans depends upon our acknowledgement of them.
And so does our full flourishing. The oppressor makes it harder for the oppressed to
achieve a complete liberation, a complete flourishing, because the very humanity of
the oppressed is battered. They overtly or covertly wonder at base whether they can
33
really be deserving of full acknowledgement, if that (so ‘basely’) is how they have
been treated. But moreoever, the oppressor decisively prevents themselves from being
fully human. In this one particular sense, the harm the oppressor does to themselves is
even worse than the harm they do to those they oppress. And by the same token it is
harder, emotionally and psychologically, for us to risk relating to them.
What does this mean? This: that Wittgenstein is investigating the truth in what we are
saying when any of us ever says or thinks or is inclined to think things like “To act in
that way [e.g. as racists do] is inhuman” xlix or “They [e.g. Jews, blacks etc.] are subhuman”. We need to humanise the oppressor by recognising how very easy it is – how
human, all-too-human it is -- to fall into the traps sprung by language and culture that
result in them being (acting) less than human, by means of them seeing others as less
than human.l (Philosophy, we might then say, is a battle against the bewitchment of
our humanity by means of language.)
Thus Wittgenstein offers counter-propaganda.li To undermine the hold upon us that
dangerous propaganda can easily attain.
Wittgenstein’s analyses of the delusions that tend to grip philosophers, all of us, are
directly parallel, I am saying, to the analyses that are needed if one really wants to
understand the attractions of racism, and how to overcome it. Understanding the great
philosophers, where they have been tempted by the traps that our language and culture
and humanity spring for us, is very much like understanding fascists / Nazis. And it is
an understanding that we must be truly ready to apply to (and to find for) ourselves.
We might even put it as grandly as this: Wittgenstein offers humanity liberation and
humanity. For, as I have in effect briefly laid out: one can’t truly have (philosophical)
34
liberation without being/becoming human. And one can only have complete
liberation, if the whole community is liberated. All of us. All.
_____________________________________________________________________
…I don’t wish to exaggerate my case. Wittgenstein’s intellectual development was no
doubt to some considerable extent self-contained. Consideration of pain as a paradigm
case was in any case already underway in his mind as early as 1929. The
Investigations is still mostly not as political-philosophical a work as it might have
been. Wittgenstein himself mostly shunned ‘real’ politics. It is hardly proven that he
fully practiced what he preached to Malcolm in his famous rant against him,
mentioned near the start of the present paper. And a Philosophical Investigations for
our time ought I believe to be more explicitly political, much less ‘indirect’, than was
Wittgenstein’s. For the time is not only dark, it is short.
…But I don’t want to understate my case either. Philosophical Investigations,
understood aright, is (much more than its predecessor texts in Wittgenstein’s oeuvre)
just the kind of book needed to dissolve the deepest seeds of war and genocide. And it
took that form exactly in that dark time, 1939-1945. Like most of the other great
artistic works that concern the Second World War and its worst episodes and the
ideology which spawned it, such as the writings of Georges Perec and works such as
Waiting for Godot, the Philosophical Investigations does not wear on its sleeve that it
is a war book. (Such sleeve-wearing is arguably inimical to most great creativity.)
But I hope that this paper may at least have made available to you an aspect, a fertile
possibility: I believe that seeing the PI as such a book is fertile for understanding the
real nature and huge significance of Wittgenstein’s anti-‘private-language’
considerations. . . For (to return to 255) it contains and offers a multi-faceted cure: a
35
set of reminders of one’s humanity, a diagnosis of the habits of mind and heart that
can loose one’s grip on others’ humanity (and ‘by extension’ therefore of one’s own),
and, through the power of heteronomy become autonomy, a consequent enabling of
the midwifing in oneself and others a deeper and less vulnerable (to loss) humanity,
because of one’s greater awareness and understanding of what that humanity requires
(namely, above all, acknowledgement of vulnerability to pain, suffering, loss).
And that is why I disagree with the judgement made by many, and possibly implicitly
in Max Sebald’s Austerlitz,lii to the effect that Wittgenstein in his work was silent
about the Second World War, and thus about the greatest issues of its time.
I hope to have shown that PI is much more of an existential text (as TLP explicitly is,
in a slightly different way) than most people have realised. (One cannot think ‘the
mind-body problem’ properly, it turns out, without thinking ethics.) This is one of the
central reasons why the perspective of Cavell, Diamond, Conant, Mulhall etc on
Wittgenstein's writing is important. The ethics that PI develops, or (better) creatively
reminds us of, is partly prompted by its time. The problems of its time lead that ethics
in a certain political direction. Wittgenstein says nothing at all, explicitly, about that
political direction, but it is to some real degree implicitly there, in the ethics, in the
interests and examples of the book. Understanding all this makes it easier for us
philosophers of our time to go on to do what Wittgenstein did not do (and, more
important, what he could not do): be stimulated to think the ethics and the politics that
our time needs.liii Wittgenstein helps open a clearing in which we can help to (for
example) think in ways that will preserve and grow our forests, and thus, preserve our
very civilisation…
36
In closing, then, one might see my thought in something like this way: Seeing a living
human being as worthy of being treated as nothing more than an automaton – a
cyborg in the mind’s eye -- is analogous to the habits of thought most centrally
subject to critique in the anti-‘private-language’ considerations. Whereas seeing in a
swastika the cross-pieces of a rifle-sight is analogous to seeing the Philosophical
Investigations as a meditation on Nazism and the like, our attractions to it, and how to
expose them relentlessly to view so that they die...liv
37
I am thinking especially of her “Russell and Wittgenstein on War: The Avant-Garding of the
Tractatus,” Common Knowledge, II, 1(Spring 1993): 15-34.
i
See Philosophical Investigations (henceforth ‘PI; London: MacMillan, 1958 (1953)) sections 107-8,
and also sections 116 and 120. Think of Wittgenstein’s emphasis in 125, on the civil status of a
contradiction: “The civil status of a contradiction, or its status in civil life: there is the philosophical
problem.” Compare this great remark from the Tractatus, 5.5563: “Our problems [in philosophy / in
this book] are not abstract, but perhaps the most concrete that there are.”
ii
In the limiting case: just one. Solipsism can be seen as a kind of extreme version of racism…(It is
very natural in fact to read Daniel Paul Schreber in this way, for instance, in his remarks on Aryanism,
and on breeding a new race of ‘Super-Schrebers’, etc. . Eric Santner develops this theme somewhat in
his My Own Private Germany: Daniel Paul Schreber's Secret History of Modernity (Princeton:
Princeton U. Pr., 1996).). I expand on this crucial point, below. (See also Gaita’s argument for why we
need a philosophical understanding of racism, in his chapter entitled “Racism: the denial of a common
humanity”.) It is a striking ‘coincidence’ in this context, and in the light of the rest of the paper below,
that Robert Jay Lifton (in The Nazi Doctors (New York: Basic Books, 2000 (1986)) refers to Mengele
as exhibiting during his conduct of ‘selections’ at the entrance to Auschwitz an “almost casual
solipsism” (p.344). Nazism is akin to solipsism, I shall be arguing in this paper, so long as we see how
the patho-logic of solipsism is directly akin to the patho-logic of racism, taken to a logical extreme.
iii
I don’t want to be drawn into a long and peripheral discussion of the status of my claim in terms of
‘authorial intention’. I am not most interested in occurent thoughts that may or may not have been
present in the mind of the man Ludwig Wittgenstein (though I shall below reflect on Wittgenstein’s
psychology in speculating about why he was so closely attuned, some appearances notwithstanding, to
the war and its underpinning attitudes, in his philosophising); my claim is about what actually gets
expressed in the text and about the implied author of the text, albeit of course in the light of facts about
the historical context and about the mind and the man, Ludwig Wittgenstein. My interpretation
suggests a historical mode of seeing-as that (applied to the text) produces the best (most charitable and
most fertile) available reading of (a crucial portion and aspect of) that text. (See also n.liii, below.)
iv
v
As in this excerpt from the opening of Tommi Uschanov’s article, “Philosophy as a service industry,
or, Reintroducing the philosophical life”, at http://www.helsinki.fi/~tuschano/writings/service/ ,
drawing on a famous incident in Wittgenstein’s life: “In the autumn of 1939, Wittgenstein and his
friend Norman Malcolm were walking along the river Cam in Cambridge when they saw a newspaper
vendor's sign announcing that the German government had accused the British government of
instigating an attempt to assassinate Hitler. When Wittgenstein remarked that it wouldn't surprise him
at all if it were true, Malcolm retorted that "the British were too civilized and decent to attempt
anything so underhand, and . . . such an act was incompatible with the British 'national character'."
Wittgenstein was furious, and the incident broke off his relations to Malcolm for some time
(Malcolm’s Memoir (Oxford: OUP, 1958), p. 30). Five years later, he wrote to Malcolm:
Whenever I thought of you I couldn't help thinking of a particular incident which seemed to me very
important. . . . you made a remark about 'national character' that shocked me by its primitiveness. I
then thought: what is the use of studying philosophy if all that it does for you is to enable you to talk
with some plausibility about some abstruse questions of logic, etc., & if it does not improve your
thinking about the important questions of everyday life, if it does not make you more conscientious than
any . . . journalist in the use of the DANGEROUS phrases such people use for their own ends.
(Malcolm, p. 93)
What is the use of studying philosophy if it doesn't improve your thinking about the important
questions of everyday life? Contradicting the standard academic account of what Wittgenstein was up
to, we believe that this is the pressing question he asked himself throughout his philosophical career. It
was also a question Wittgenstein thought of as outweighing any specific philosophical theses or
theories. But it is also exactly the question that has been forgotten and even laughed at by the
mainstream of today's professional philosophy.” Like Uschanov, I mean to overturn such forgetting.
(Cf. also n.liii and n.xxiii, below.)
38
See e.g. PI 103, 115, 111, 129; and 308: “How does the philosophical problem about mental
processes and states and about behaviourism arise?---The first step is the one that altogether escapes
notice. We talk of processes and states and leaver their nature undecided… (The decisive move in the
conjuring trick has been made, and it was the very one that we thought innocent.)”. And compare also
this, from the Big Typescript 423: “Human beings are deeply embedded in philosophical – i.e.
grammatical – confusions.” (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2005)
vi
vii
To a degree, one can read off how to see the world aright precisely by what is wrong with these
overly crude and mechanical pseudo-models. They provide as it were a photographic negative for the
perspicuous representation that one seeks. (But this point must not be exaggerated, for several reasons,
including crucially that the guidance thus attained is actually only guidance that moves one away from
error, not toward ‘truth’. It is in that sense actually rather like Darwinian evolution. Wittgensteinian
philosophy issues not in a quasi-theoretical representation of ‘the grammar’, but in a compendium of
techniques and hints for how to move away from confusing and delusional orientations towards our
language, our life.)
What the robotic etc moments certainly give us is a strong preparatory counterpoint to those moments,
highlighted in this paper, when Wittgenstein actually explicitly gives us an emotional setting for or a
human conclusion to the dialogical movement of thought he has created. The latter are as it were the
telos of the former. (In part this is because the robotic etc. scenarios, if they succeed in depicting
anything at all that makes sense, amount in most cases to alarming or uncanny failures of humanity,
too. For instance, the ‘reading-machines’ of PI 156-179 fairly clearly involve an (un-)ethical abuse.
That is to say: people being treated as the ‘reading-machines’ of those passages are treated would I
think be fairly said to be having their humanity violated. (Somewhat-similarly: neoliberal economic
efficiency, the self-fulfilling prophecy of ‘homo economicus’, not to mention call-centres and the like;
all tend to make workers, consumers, buyers and sellers more and more machine-like…))
For further explication of this point, see Hutchinson’s and my “Therapy” : in K.D. Jolley (ed.)
Wittgenstein: Key concepts (London: Acumen, 2008).
viii
Especially, as the considerations against the strong temptation to reach for ‘something’ which one
might want to call a ‘private language’ start to come to a head, from about 280-315.
ix
Cf. also 281-4, and 581-3; and also p.154 of Simon Glendinning’s In the name of phenomenology
(Oxford: Routledge, 2007). Of course, there are very important differences between Wittgenstein and
Levinas. One crucial one that emerges from the passages I go on to discuss below is this: for
Wittgenstein, it’s not impossible to really/fully understand another. Real community is attainable and
indeed fundamental for Wittgenstein (in a way that it is not, as I understand him, for Levinas); it
needn’t be ‘deferred’. Levinas’s vision of the ‘alterity’ of ‘the Other’ repeats the very gesture of the
alleged unknowability of others critiqued so deeply by Wittgenstein. In future work, I hope to criticise
at length Levinas’s unhelpful attribution of ‘infinitude’ to ‘Others’, which keeps them forever apart
from us.
x
xi
Again, it is important to be clear what I am not saying here. I am not saying that the root of racism IS
philosophical scepticism about other minds; that would be silly. Rather, I am saying, somewhat along
the lines laid out in the “Afterword” of Rai Gaita’s Good and Evil (2nd edition; New York: Routledge,
2004), that racism can be fomented by and is typically buttressed by something remarkably like
scepticism about other minds. Somehow, one manages to half-convince oneself that the others don’t
really suffer as ‘we’ do, don’t really feel as ‘we’ do; don’t really matter as ‘we’ do.
I am not saying that the route that Wittgenstein takes toward dissolving such prejudice is the only
available one. Could the belief in an immortal, God-given soul not do the same job? Probably yes.
Wittgenstein's line of thinking is, roughly, a secular version of much the same point. The
Wittgensteinian way with such prejudice is, then, a way for our times. So; I am not of course making
the absurd claim that (e.g.) the anti-slavery or the anti-fascist movement couldn’t have succeeded
without Wittgenstein (!). I am saying that at the deepest level Wittgenstein’s line of thinking helps feed
such movements of thought and action, and that the return to humanity which he seeks to effect in
thought and feeling is a return which they analogously seek to effect in thought, feeling and action.
Wittgenstein’s books are (of course) not explicitly political, and are in some ways deliberately nonpolitical. But, insomuchas anti-racism is political, for instance, then I think that the 'Investigations'
deliberately creates space for the politics we have needed...
39
Compare also Wittgenstein’s wonderful discussion at 350f; and section 295; and below. Compare
also Stanley Cavell’s important work on acknowledgement. And compare for example this moment in
Mulhall’s Wittgenstein’s private language (Oxford: Clarendon, 2007): “[T]he child can come to
employ the word ‘pain’ with respect to himself and to others only in so far as others have already
employed that term with respect to him… . But it is not just that those others must be able to see his
behaviour as expressive of pain; they must also be willing to do so. One might say: his cries must be
seen as, acknowledged as, cries of pain by those who make up his social world if he is to receive the
gift or graft of pain.” (p.30; cf. also p.36). Mulhall is here reading PI 246. Which helps to underline that
what I am talking about in the present paper applies to pretty much the whole of the ‘anti-‘privatelanguage’ considerations, not just to the passages that I have picked out for particular emphasis here.
And what is referenced here by Mulhall is also what makes the ‘(photographic) negative’ of our actual
social relations that can be found in so many of Wittgenstein’s imaginary scenarios (cf. n.vii, above) so
crucial. The absence of acknowledgement of pain tells us a huge amount about our actual, fragile,
beautiful life with sensation-words and the like.
xii
xiii
Of (what Buddhists call) our ‘inter-being’.
xiv
P. 46 of his Wittgenstein’s private language.
Here, compare PI 539. (It is also interesting to bear in mind here Wittgenstein’s repeated thoughtexperimental consideration of (e.g.) tribes which do not sympathise with sufferers unless their wound is
visible. Wittgenstein is very interested in establishing the contours of the (our) concept of pain, by
reference to other possibilities – mostly involving a lack of sympathy/empathy/acknowledgement.)
xv
xvi
This is the task that Thomas Berry identifies in his important book, The Great Work: our way into
the future (New York: Random House, 1999). See also n. xxviii, below.
xvii
Or substitute other sometimes badly-oppressed groups: Palestinians, for instance.
xviii
And, more widely: to the creaturely field. To the field of all beings. See note xxx, below.
My use of scare quotes is advised: because the ‘relationship’ is an ‘internal’ one, as Peter Winch
argued in detail. That is to say: ‘individuals’ are part of the community. This is a part-whole
relationship. This whole is prior to its parts. (Of course, saying that the community is the best
candidate for being regarded as the in-dividual - that it, and not the individual organism, is the
founding whole - does not mean that it cannot be divided at all. It of course can be divided, e.g. in
‘civil’ war. But so can the ‘individual’ person / organism – e.g., in mental distress and disorder, as
discussed below. And, as I am acknowledging, without the continued active work of acknowledgement,
the community will always be divided. People will always fail to realize their oneness with one another,
until they no longer so fail. Seeing that oneness as a project, an achievement, rather than thinking of the
individual organism as the fundamental unit or of the community as an organism such that those failing
to go along with the tide are foreign bodies (see n.xxi, below) – this is the real task, and (when
achieved) the real achievement. As Zen Buddhism puts it: we are one, and yet we are no doubt in the
process many, too. This paradox must be lived. There is no easy route to the good in-dividuality of the
community.)
xix
xx
As Lifton (among others) has powerfully argued, the biological metaphor of the race or people was
taken extremely seriously (quasi-literally) by the Nazis. They sometimes spoke of the volk as if a single
organism, and of other races as parasites etc. But even this does not make their conception any more
akin to the in-dividual conception of the community being essayed here. For the logic of purity and of
expurgating ‘parasites’ and ‘infections’ etc. endlessly inclines the communalist ‘people’ to turn inwards
and to cut off and at least thoroughly to other parts of itself (in a fashion closely paralleling the quasisolipsistic logic of the paranoid psychotic mind, as analysed by R. D. Laing in The divided self
(London: Penguin, 1966); see also n.xxiv, below. The logic of the seriously paranoid mind is such that,
in a deadly recess-ion away from life, it starts to devitalise and ‘machine-ise’ everybody and
everything, including ever more of itself / of oneself.). The ‘oneness’ of the racist community is a
blind: it conceals a continual near-psychotic paranoia, an endless search for traitors and foreign bodies,
a restless violent self-suspicion. (Unlike the ‘Wittgensteinian’ community, which is humanly inclusive
40
and not divided and re-dividing against itself in this way. Needless to say, such a vision of community,
of us as in-dividual, of real mutual acknowledgement as the norm rather than the exception, is hugely
hard to attain in a world increasingly dominated by materialism and ‘individualism’ (and cf. n.xix,
above). But that needs must be a topic for another occasion.)
Endless searching for ‘the enemy within’, hyper-vigilant questing for purity/purification excuses
continual self-attack, and violent purging of anyone who may defile or contaminate: these characterise
the ‘communalist’ mind-set. In extremis, this results (see e.g. p.487 of Lifton) in the turning in of the
destructive genocidal power of racism onto(in this case) the Germans themselves: I am referring to
Hitler’s call in 1945 for loyal Nazis to commit suicide, and his call for a scorched earth policy across
all of Germany. The War being lost, Hitler declared that the German people too were lost – and so they
might as well die. They had proven themselves unworthy. They had proven themselves to be, we might
say, not real Germans, at all. . . This is how the logic of racism, like the logic of solipsism, consumes
itself and consumes its ‘host’…
xxi
Think here of Daniel Paul Schreber, and his “fleeting-improvised men”, etc. .
Compare here Louis Sass’s argument for why solipsism turns into depersonalisation, into psychotic
paranoia, and so on, in his The Paradoxes of delusion: Wittgenstein, Schreber and the schizophrenic
mind (Ithaca: Cornell, 1994).
xxii
What is the ‘resolute’ reading? It is the ‘programme’ (due in the first instance to Cora Diamond and
James Conant) of understanding Wittgenstein’s philosophy, early AND late, as consistent, as
consistently ‘therapeutic’, as genuinely just returning ourselves to ourselves.
Why is it important for the present paper? I hope that that is already fairly obvious, and will become
more so as the paper continues (and see particularly n.xxxiv, below).
Why is the ‘resolute’ reading one with being an ‘ethical’ reading? I think the answer is present
implicitly throughout the work of Cavell, recent Putnam, Conant, recent Mulhall, etc. Among other
things, as argued earlier, and as I hope this paper as a whole brings out: Philosophical problems such as
‘the mind-body problem’ are intrinsically involved with ethics. You can’t hope to solve nor to dissolve
nor even really to understand ‘that problem’ without an ethical sensibility.
xxiii
See Sass’s “Deep disquietudes: Reflections on Wittgenstein as anti-philosopher”, in James Klagge
(ed.) Wittgenstein: Biography and Philosophy (Cambridge: CUP, 2001). My view, for what it’s worth,
is that it would be more psychiatrically accurate to describe Wittgenstein as having merely mild
schizothymic rather than ‘schizoid’ tendencies.
xxiv
Also, like Sass, I tend to agree with the British ‘object relations’ (and Kretschmerian) view of the
schizoid/schizothyme as combining a capacity for coldness and distance with hypersensitivity.
(Guntrip et al argue that the coldness and detachment is actually a defence against a deeper neediness
and sensitivity and concern. For more on all of this, see Sass’s ibid.) Thus Wittgenstein would be
peculiarly well-suited for exploring, with profound emotional resonance, the human tendencies to
know and to deny the other. (Including the tendencies starkly visible in the Nazi doctors, most of
whom exhibited schizoid or ‘doubling’ tendencies to a high degree. This is explicitly suggested in
Lifton at p.398 and in Chapter 19 of his op.cit. .)
xxv
xxvi
And, to be fair, there IS a great deal of discussion of colour as a key example in the anti-‘privatelanguage’ considerations: see e.g. section 273f. . (Wittgenstein moves fairly seamlessly between the
two cases (pain, and colour) and others. This of course tells us something deep about Wittgenstein’s
method, and about the absurdity of dividing philosophy into rigid alleged sub-disciplines.) But pain
tends to dominate as the example in PI, in a way in which it does not, in the works that preceded PI. It
supersedes too, notably, toothache. Pain I think is a more apposite case to focus on, in a time of war
and genocide.
xxvii
Compare TLP 6.43 (Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus; London: Routledge, 1922). And see Elaine
Scarry’s important work.
xxviii
This last remark perhaps raises the question: What would a Philosophical Investigations for our
time – a time when, as Gaita argues (in the middle chapters of his A Common Humanity), the
intellectual battle against racism has been to a large extent won - look like?
41
It would I think take some inspiration from Thomas Berry – but without his residual supernaturalism,
and without his tendency to fall into more or less Cartesian confusions, such as when he talks about the
‘spiritual realm’ (modelled on the material realm – see e.g. PI 36 for Wittgenstein’s critique), the
‘mindsphere’ (modelled on the biosphere), and ‘psychical energy’ (modelled on (physical) energy).
It would certainly build on the important work of Hans Jonas; I am thinking particularly of p.39f. of his
The imperative of responsibility: In search of an ethics for the technological age (London: U. Chicago
Press, 1984). It would also take inspiration from those moments already present in Wittgenstein’s great
book that anticipate precisely the first part of the work needing to be done, as our centre of concern
translates or turns from taking others seriously to the parallel and yet different case of taking seriously
others who don’t even exist yet. And even if they might never exist, if our love fails them. (For those
who find these thoughts too paradoxical, I would urge a remark of Kuhn’s, in a non-altogetherdissimilar context: “I am convinced that we must learn to make sense of statements that at least
resemble these.” (Structure of Scientific Revolutions (Chicago: U. Chicago Press, 1962), p121) We
need to undergo something of a revolution in ourselves and in our thinking about the relation between
ourselves and the future… See again Jonas for some progress in this direction, especially p.132f. on the
ought-to-be-ness of a future for humankind. See also my “How ought we to think of our relationship to
future generations?”, forthcoming.)
It would at a subtly and suitably deep level work on what gets in the way of taking others who don’t yet
exist (the 7th generation, etc) as an effective centre of concern for us. Perhaps it would take love and the
(co-)creation of what one loves as a central exemplar?
But this would as I say only be the first part of the work needing to be done; something deeper, only
barely anticipated in Wittgenstein (see my “Why nature can’t be naturalised” (in Naomi Scheman (ed.),
Feminist readings of Ludwig Wittgenstein (Philadelphia: PennState, 2002)), is: to overcome the
obstacles to the eco-centric thinking that urgently needs to succeed any kind of anthropocentric
thinking, even the transformed kind that centres on as yet non-existent persons. We need to come to see
our (human) interests as indivisible from the ecosystem’s, to see ourselves as nothing without the
ecosystem in which we are niched and which we co-constitute, etc. (Compare p.136f. of Jonas). This is
very challenging, and will require our wills even more than our intellects to change. That is: We need
to reinvent the human, as part of the ecosphere - and not ‘just’ (as in PI) ‘recover’ the human…
And, harder still: we really need to mean it. (The deepest difficulty hereabouts is I think one of the will,
not of the intellect.)
A worthy successor to the Philosophical Investigations for the darkness of this time, the time of ‘the
climate war’ (the war against dangerous climate change), rather than of the war against fascism, is yet
to be much written, but is in my view very sorely needed. For, as things stand, the climate war, unlike
the Second World War, is set to be lost.
This is perhaps a good moment to reinforce the point, implicit in Glendinning’s On being with
others (Abingdon, Oxon: Routledge, 1998), that the anti-‘private-language’ considerations go much
wider than merely to human beings: they concern most animals, to some degree. Take for instance 284:
“Look at a stone and imagine it having sensations.—One says to oneself: How could one so much as
get the idea of ascribing a sensation to a thing? One might as well ascribe it to a number!—And now
look at a wriggling fly and at once these difficulties vanish and pain seems able to get a foothold here,
where before everything was, so to speak, too smooth for it.” Wittgenstein is interested in all creatures
(elsewhere in this book and in his work, we meet also suffering dogs, spiders, etc), whose suffering we
fail to acknowledge or can fail to acknowledge; in this way, he is superior to some of his best
contemporary followers, such as Winch or McDowell, who tend to single human beings out in an
anthropocentric manoeuvre of unfortunate effect and dubious provenance. Thus the thrust of the
present paper is in the end directed toward the suffering of a whole suffering world, not just a narrowly
human world. (Cf. also n.xxviii, below. A recent film which is interested in an intelligent way in this
topic is District 9, which clearly overcomes a narrow or chauvinistic understanding of or valorization
of ‘humanity’ such as Winch and McDowell and even Gaita too (see p. 14-15 and 268-9 of his (2000))
fall into.)
xxix
And now we might ask this: Did Heidegger’s casual despising of ‘ordinary everydayness’,
conceived of as a state that allowed of an alternative superior attitude and space, leave him peculiarly
vulnerable to the appeal of Nazism? Is this a – more or less philosophical - clue to why these two great
German-speaking voices of the 20th century jumped in opposite directions, on the crucial question of
their time, from 1933 thru 1945?
xxx
42
xxxi
One thing that I particularly like about this example is that it helps refute the silly accusations
sometimes made against Wittgenstein of his being allegedly an anti-intellectual or anti-scientific
thinker. For here, the anti-intellectualist route is precisely a scientific route: i.e. mentioning a scientific
experiment etc as a case of everyday activity. The ordinary or everyday, as Wittgenstein means the
term, is not counterposed to the scientific; only to the metaphysical / the nonsensical. (On this, see also
my “Throwing away ‘the bedrock’” Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society 2005, vol. 105 (1), pp. 8198; and the discussion in the text, below.)
xxxii
Wittgenstein had already developed the swastika case of seeing-as at some length in the Brown
Book (e.g. p.164), wherein he emphasises how much cognitive work it takes to see a square with
diagonals as a (limiting case of a) swastika. The automaton parallel, the ‘cyborg’ of human-(seen)-asautomaton, is however absent here: it only enters into the scene several years later, in PI itself.
xxxiii
Such that they could be experimented upon, discarded at will, etc. . Writing the point in this way
naturally brings to mind Philip K. Dick’s Do androids dream of electric sheep? (A question to which
the answer is: No, they too, if they dream, dream of real sheep) / Scott’s Blade Runner, and the
beautiful Wittgensteinian analysis of the latter made by Stephen Mulhall, e.g. in his “Picturing the
human (body and soul)”, 1994 - Film and Philosophy 1. An important moment for Mulhall’s paper is
section iv of the so-called ‘Part II’ of PI (see also especially, in the present context, PI Part I sections
281–283, 359-360, 422). Where Wittgenstein suggests the following: “ “I believe that he is not an
automaton”, just like that, so far makes no sense. // My attitude toward him is an attitude toward a soul.
I am not of the opinion that he has a soul.” This is drawing a kind of consequence from the discussion
in PI’s 200s, as discussed above. A soul is not a thing within a body. Its existence can in a way be read
off how we act / behave toward one another: not (as a Behaviourist might have it) how we behave
toward bodies, but how we behave toward people. And a strong enough failure to behave toward
another as toward a person evinces something very like the delusion that someone inclined to speak a
nonsense such as the bare utterance of “I believe he is not an automaton” is prone to. Of course, a racist
belief often has enough ‘context’ and ‘back-up’ that establishing that it is nonsense is much harder, its
metaphysical status much murkier. It will take a huge undoing of propaganda. The kind of undoing, in
fact that the thought of great philosophers takes – not the kind of easy pickings that most so-called
‘Wittgensteinians’ make it sound like (cf. n.xxxiv, below). Rather: the kind of unpicking that
Wittgenstein actually, painstakingly, carries out.
It is quite as if Dick, or at least Ridley Scott, had read Wittgenstein, in fact. (And of course Do androids
dream of electric sheep? was intended explicitly as an allegory of Nazism/racism.)
For another, related, case, compare these excerpts from the Tocqueville’s Democracy in America
(Indianapolis: Hackett, 2000 (1831)), pp.249-251: “When all men . . . are ranked in an irrevocable way
according to their occupation, wealth, and birth, . . . each caste has its opinions, its sentiments, its
rights, its moral habits, its separate existence. Thus the men who compose it [a caste] bear no
resemblance to any of the others; they do not have the same way of thinking or of feeling, and if they
believe themselves to belong to the same humanity, the do so just barely… // It is easy to see that the
lot of [slaves] inspires little pity in their masters and that they [the masters] see in slavery not only a
state of affairs from which they profit, but also an evil that scarcely touches them. In this way, the same
man who is full of humanity for his fellow men when they are at the same time his equals becomes
insensitive to their sufferings the moment the equality ceases.” Tocqueville argues that equality is the
best guarantor for the ability to see one’s fellow humans as humans. If we are impressed by this line of
thinking, then we might naturally connect Wittgenstein’s PI with a political philosophy that is
genuinely egalitarian. (See my “Wittgenstein vs. Rawls”, forthcoming, on this score. Rawls said in an
autobiographical sketch, near the end of his life, that “Three years spent in the U.S. army in World War
Two led me to be…concerned with political questions. Around 1950 I started to write a book on
justice.” Raymond Geuss (in his “Neither history nor praxis” (European Review 11:3 (2003), pp.281292) argues that it is a bizarre response to World War Two to think that what it suggests is the need for
an abstract answer to an abstract question, “What is the correct conception of justice”, and moreover to
think that the abstractions in question ought to be in the form of a plan for the correct distribution of
rights, ‘goods’ and services. My argument in the present paper is that Wittgenstein’s response to his
time was, some appearances to the contrary, much more relevant. For Wittgenstein, I am suggesting, in
effect asked “How are ideologies like Nazism possible? What are their intellectual conditions? What is
the nature of their attractions? How can we overcome those deep attractions?”)
43
The failure to acknowledge this fragility, a failure present in the ‘standard’ readings of the socalled ‘private language argument’ offered for instance by Norman Malcolm and by Baker-and-Hacker,
is thus of real moment. In their pretence or hope that human beings can definitively establish one
another’s humanity, and definitively overcome the sense of any possible gap between them, these
writers betray a lack of any sense of vertigo (and in this, they contrast strikingly with ‘New’
Wittgensteinians such as McDowell and Cavell – see e.g. p.43 of McDowell’s “Non-cognitivism and
rule-following”, in my and Crary’s edited collection, The New Wittgenstein (London: Routledge,
2000)), a lack of sensitivity to the endless human temptation to fall away from freely-given mutuality, a
temptation that is the very reason why the later Wittgenstein writes in the almost-painful circling semiunending fashion that he does. Thus for these ‘standard’ writers/readers, Wittgenstein’s mode of
literary self-presentation can never be truly defended against those still-more-standard philosophers
who find this mode simply obscure, an encumbrance, and who are concomitantly unimpressed with
what then (understandably) appears to them to be the quasi-behaviourism or question-beggingness of
the so-called ‘private language argument’ presented by ‘standard’ Wittgensteinians.
xxxiv
xxxv
In his The Nazi Doctors. (See p.197, for a powerful account of how practice normalised, at
Auschwitz.)
xxxvi
See e.g. the example cited at p.68 of A common humanity, of a rabbi forced by a Nazi to spit on
the Torah, and then, when he ran out of saliva, being ‘supplied’ by the Nazi with more – i.e. the
German spat into the rabbi’s mouth, so that the rabbi could continue to spit on his holy book.
xxxvii
Ordinary Men : Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland, New York :
HarperCollins, 1992.
Compare p.213 of Lifton, on Auschwitz as, paradoxically, generally a “calm” place. And the least
awful and most ‘normal’ of the Nazi doctors at Auschwitz, Dr.B, quoted on p.320: “[F]or me
[Auschwitz] was also everyday living, you see.” (Italics added) (Though see also p.447 of Lifton, on a
certain sense in which places like Auschwitz did become entirely removed from the ordinary world,
from Planet Earth.)
xxxviii
xxxix
E.g. at p.15 of his majestic The Nazi doctors. See also pp.159-160, and pp.442-7, and see p.193,
p.195f., p.231, and p.443, for fascinating analysis of the crucial role that alcohol played in this
numbing. Cf. also e.g. p.228, on derealization in the camps.
xl
Here once more of course BladeRunner is profoundly relevant; see n.xxxiii, above. (Of course, one of
the themes of BladeRunner is that one who runs along the blade that separates (e.g.) the oppressed and
the oppressor is best-placed to project themselves into the mind of either group. To play the detective
as best it can be played. (This is the central theme of Thomas Harris’s Red Dragon (New York:
Putnams, 1981), and of the masterful film (Manhunter) thereof made by Michael Mann.) This connects
with n.xxiv and n.xxv, above; Wittgenstein is a maestro at understanding minds that are un-understood,
and at understanding the nature of the mastery of and failure to understand mind, full stop. In future
work, I hope to return to the question of the psychological danger and pain consequent upon the project
of entering into such psychical territory, hazards known to the protagonist of Manhunter, to
Wittgenstein, and of course to historians of the Holocaust.)
xli
Quotes taken from Lifton p.344 and p.377.
xlii
Male Fantasies. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987, cited at p.495 of Lifton.
Compare also Lifton (p.462) speaking of the apogee of “anti-empathic male power” in Nazism. The
risk of lack of empathy that Wittgenstein examined philosophically could be writ large in the
‘hardness’ of the Nazi male ideal examined in cultural-historical detail by Theweleit.
xliii
The Nazis were of course the first Holocaust deniers, and their political heirs today continue that
practice. (On the alleged ‘sub-human’ status of the victims, compare this, from p.206 of Lifton: “Nazi
doctors, as a Czech doctor, Erich G., observed, would “treat Jewish people as having a human form but
not a human quality””.)
44
xliv
As Wittgenstein completed Philosophical Investigations, he also wrote a letter to Victor Gollancz (I
have seen a copy at the von Wright archive, in Helsinki; see also
http://sammelpunkt.philo.at:8080/445/1/19-1-95.TXT ), out of being appalled at the failure of most of
his contemporaries, especially the media, to take sufficiently seriously the suffering of the survivors of
Buchenwald, of the famine-victims in central Europe (including in Germany), and so on. He wrote of
his horror at the unspeakable horror of Buchenwald being underplayed. And he wrote of his discomfort
at Gollancz’s own (he thought) over-intellectual - rather grandiose and verbose - response to these
horrors and failures. Wittgenstein’s own preferred method of ‘response’ was, I am tentatively
suggesting, far more ‘indirect’: his philosophical work.
This is connected with Gaita’s remark at p.xvii of his (2000): “[A] preparedness to see (and in that
sense to judge) a situation in a severe moral light while at the same time refusing to blame strikes some
people as incoherent. That, I think, is the effect of a moralistic conception of morality.” I mean to be
developing roughly such a non-moralistic political ethics, like Gaita, from Wittgenstein. Seeing,
acknowledging, and severely judging, without descending into the unseeing othering which merely
blaming leaves one condemned to. (Cf. also p.xxiii of Gaita.) And as Lifton has argued (see the
Foreword and Introduction of his (2000)): we also fear contagion from perpetrators of great evil. This
is one reason why we are inclined to insist or to presuppose, dangerously wrongly, that we are utterly
unlike the perpetrators.
xlv
xlvi
Kierkegaard was especially insistent upon this (as James Conant has been, latterly).
And cf. Gaita’s exegesis thereof at p.267 of his (2000). It is worth noting in this connection that at
Dachau, the ‘model’ of the Nazi concentration camp empire, “camp guards were to be trained in
cruelty and to dispense it with pitilessness (or “hardness”).” (Lifton, p.153). This observation fits with
Gaita’s stress on the knowing humanity-violation of Nazism. (Cruelty was in certain respects vast,
deliberate and systematic.) It fits also with Thewelheit’s subtle emphasis on “hardness” as an important
factor. It is … a wafer away from the simple absence of pity, that would be appropriate if one were
handling (say) automata. In the psychological manoueuvre that Lifton calls “doubling”, Nazis were
often able to ‘forget’ (or rationalise away) that they were dealing with human beings at all, and in that
sense not to be cruel. But merely technical (see the discussion of the burning of corpses at Auschwitz,
supra). Or were able to somehow think that they were minimising the suffering (perhaps to zero) of
their victims, who in that sense approximated to beings not feeling any pain (e.g. automata). Take for
instance this from Hoss, commandant of Auschwitz, quoted at p.162 of Lifton: “I had always thought
that the victims [of gassing via Zyklon B] would experience a terrible choking sensation. But the
bodies, without exception, showed no signs of convulsion. The doctors explained to me that the prussic
acid had a paralysing effect on the lungs, but its actions were so quick and so strong that death came
before the convulsions could set in, and in this its effects differed from those produced by carbon
monoxide or by a general oxygen deficiency. // I always shuddered at the prospect of carrying out
exterminations by shooting… I was therefore relieved to think that we were to be spared all these blood
baths, and that the victims too would be spared suffering...” (Italics mine). Compare also the important
remark Hitler made in his suicide note / ‘last testament’, to the effect that “more humane means” had
allegedly been used to murder the Jews than “Europe’s Aryan peoples” had painfully suffered during
the War. (Quoted by Raul Hilberg at p.635 of his The Destruction of the European Jews (Chicago:
Quadrangle Press, 1967 (1961)).)
xlvii
xlviii
That is: with those one recognises as perpetrators/oppressors. Often, the easiest path is simply to
fail to recognise oppression at all, and to identify with the oppressors rather than with the oppressed.
There are a number of powerful examples of this, for instance, in Anthony Beevor’s D-Day (New
York: Viking, 2009). As R.W. Johnson remarks in his review thereof, in the London Review of Books,
10 Sept. 2009 (pp.21-2): “To most allied soldiers the Germans’ behaviour was mad, even subhuman,
and reports of Nazi atrocities merely confirmed them in their view”.
xlix
l
Compare here my analysis of The Lord of the Rings, e.g. in my Philosophy for Life (London:
Continuum, 2007). Compare also this important moment in Cavell’s great essay on “Knowing and
acknowledging”, in Must we mean what we cannot say? (New York: Cambridge U.P., 1969): “[Y]our
suffering makes a claim upon me. It is not enough that I know (am certain) that you suffer—I must do
45
or reveal something… In a word, I must acknowledge it, otherwise I do not know what ‘your (your or
his) being in pain’ means…”. (See n.xii above, for some development of this point.)
Wittgenstein’s emphasis on this (counter-propaganda) has been particularly strongly taken up in the
later work of Gordon Baker. (Cf. also Gaita’s statement (p. xx) as to what his book is fundamentally
about: “Were I pressed to state the central concern of A common humanity I would say that it is with
the ways human beings are sometimes invisible, or only partially visible to one another, with how that
effects and is effected by a understanding of morality.”)
li
According, that is, to the reading suggested by Nina Pelikan Straus, in her “Sebald, Wittgenstein,
and the Ethics of Memory”, Comparative Literature 2009 61(1):43-53. I am unconvinced by Straus’s
reading of Sebald, and she does little to make the case that Wittgenstein is subject to criticism by him
for his (Wittgenstein’s) alleged silence over the war. But in any case: In much the way that she sees
Austerlitz as Sebald’s implicit critique of Wittgenstein for his alleged silence over the war, I see PI
precisely as an implicit speaking about the war…
lii
liii
I am also thinking here of the following remark from the Preface to PI, which follows immediately
upon Wittgenstein’s remark about the darkness of the time: “I should not like my writing to spare other
people the trouble of thinking. But, if possible, to stimulate someone to thoughts of his own.” And in
the end, of course, it matters comparatively little how much of the philosophy in this paper is
Wittgenstein’s, how much is Cavell’s etc., and how much is mine. What matters much more is whether
there is present here the resources to do the job: roughly, the job of understanding and overcoming the
inhuman in the human (in all of us). The job that Wittgenstein explicitly indexes in an early draft of the
Preface to Philosophical Remarks (Oxford: Blackwell, 1980 (1930)), in which he refers directly to
fascism as of the current of contemporary European civilisation, that he was writing against…
liv
Deep thanks for very helpful readings of prior drafts of this paper to Marjorie Perloff, Louis Sass,
Hans Sluga, Oskari Kuusela, Stephen Mulhall, Simon Glendinning, Angus Ross, and to helpful
audiences at the Abo Academy, Finland, and at Manchester Metropolitan University, Crewe.